Probably nobody other than me is running Vista, but I thought I'd record a few things I've discovered to clamp down on the apparently random spikes in hard disk activity. There seem to be three main culprits:

1. Anti-virus/Windows Defender - Most AV packages seem to default to performing a whole system scan daily. This seems excessive (particularly ( Read more... )

The other main set of generalisations used in wine comes from identifying wine with the place where it's made. This a popular way of categorising wine: most wine merchants divide their stock geographically, as do most wine lists beyond a certain length. This obviously works a lot better than categorising by grape variety, because wine often ( Read more... )

Faced with a confusing mass of information, people like to make simplifying generalisations. "Foos tend to be rather blueish, whereas bars tend more towards red," for example. Then even when you come across a scarlet foo, you can still slot it into your mental schema by thinking of it as exceptional. "Aha," you can think to yourself, "this is a ( Read more... )

I've now been reviewing wines for a exactly one month, and I've written 46 reviews, so it seems an appropriate point to write a few words about the tasting process ( Read more... )

I now have 14 wine reviews up on Ocado (over 2 pages). (The reason that my reviews are generally positive, by the way, is that I'm working my way through our "wines we like" list. Once I get on to tasting new wines, I would expect them to be much more mixed.)

Over on Wikipedia, I've added pages on Margaux and Pomerol and significantly expanded ( Read more... )

I seem to have been watching a lot of programmes about archaeology recently. I think the BBC must have decided that they're a rich seem: there was Lost Cities of the Ancients, and now we have Ancient Apocalypse, Meet the Romans with Mary Beard and Divine Women all running simultaneously. They're quite enjoyable: sensationalist, of course, but ( Read more... )

There are 58 references to honey in the Old Testament (as opposed to 4 in the New Testament) and 20 of them are as part of the phrase "a land flowing with milk and honey"; in addition we have Job 20:17 "the rivers flowing with honey and cream" and Song 4:11 "milk and honey are under your tongue" and Isaiah 7:22 "And because of the abundance of the ( Read more... )

There was quite an interesting Start the Week this week, about faith and doubt. However, there is one point on which I disagree quite forcefully with what seemed to be the unanimous opinion of the guests ( Read more... )

Once again, it's that time when British people feel the need to comment on a political system they don't really understand, and this journal is no exception ( Read more... )

( Spoilers )